


Meet Me in Montauk

by heenimlee



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Break Up, Some day I'll write something that's not sad, jk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:22:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27405721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heenimlee/pseuds/heenimlee
Summary: "...and yeah that’s, that’s what the movie’s about. He wants to try again. Even though he knows how badly it ended the first time. They still find each other. Despite everything.”
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Lee Taeyong
Comments: 65
Kudos: 177





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I'm back. With more angst. If Jaeyong could just hold hands or something I might be able to produce something less miserable.  
> There might be a few (a lot of) errors because as always I lost patience in the process of editing. I'm sorry in advance! Hope you enjoy this!

December 2016

  
Jaehyun’s laughing. Cheek to Taeyong’s bare chest, his head was rising and falling with Taeyong’s breathing before, but now it’s rattling with Taeyong’s laughter. 

“I think you’ll end up getting a piercing,” he says.

“No way,” Taeyong tells him. His voice is a pleasant rumble against one side of his face. “I’m not brave enough.” 

Jaehyun smiles, props his chin up on Taeyong’s chest so he can look up at him.

“I’ll come with you. I’ll hold your hand.”

“No. What if I cry?” 

“Then I’ll make fun of you.”

“You’re the worst.”

“You said you love me,” he reminds him. He removes himself from Taeyong, settles his elbows against the mattress, so he can see him better. Black hair all messy, perfectly at ease, no longer shy like he was when they first undressed. His broad shoulders and his chest tapering to a slim waist. His lashes, and his long fingers tracing the floral pattern of the sheet by his hip.

“I do love you,” Taeyong says. 

Jaehyun smiles. 

He wriggles closer, taking fistfuls of blanket with him. He tosses it over Taeyong, and Taeyong curls under the warmth gratefully. He gets a knee almost to his balls because they’re not used to maneuvering around each other yet, and they giggle. It’s alright. Tonight isn’t for habit, tonight is for firsts. First I love you, first afterglow. 

He’s sure it will be habit, some day. it’ll be easy. He’ll hold his hand out and Taeyong will take it without needing to see. He’ll tug him close and he’ll mould to his outlines just as easy as breathing. But that day won’t glow like this one does. 

This one, this night of firsts, he’s certain every moment of it will glow like the fireflies he caught in his grandmother’s garden back in Busan. He’s certain he’ll always want this in a jar on his nightstand to watch over him while he sleeps, he’ll want to show it off as if to say this beautiful, wondrous thing, somehow I’ve managed to catch it, somehow it’s mine now to keep. And unlike those little bugs, this light will glow till he dies. 

They end up with Jaehyun’s head on Taeyong’s arm and their legs tangled together. Jaehyun’s drawing patterns on Taeyong’s hip now. And Taeyong’s thumb is stroking his cheek. Their toes wrestling under the blanket. He’s not sure who’s winning. He’s not sure what the game is. 

The sheets are crumpled under their bare bodies, uncomfortable ridges under their sides. It’s snowing outside, but the room is warm, the blanket warmer. The music’s a gentle swing, quiet, because it’s so late and people are asleep, and it’s been all their favourite songs. 

“You know what this song is about?” He says. He can’t help that he says it quietly, like it’s some great secret only lovers can share.

“Hmm? I wasn’t paying attention to it.” 

“Gondry,” Jaehyun says. He sweeps the hair off Taeyong’s forehead. “Michael Gondry, he made a movie.”

“It’s about a guy who made a movie?”

Jaehyun grins. 

“It’s about the people in the movie. These two people,” he says. “These two, they fall in love and they get together, and they’re different, you know? Very different. So like, they end up hurting each other. And they break up -

“I don’t think I like this movie,” Taeyong says. 

Jaehyun laughs, all hushed. Taeyong is always hurt by other people’s hurt. He’s always crying over sad songs, sad movies, sad books, and the hurt always stays with him for hours. He’s hurt so easily, and that’s why his favourite movies are all sweet summer afternoons in make believe towns, gentle piano and scenes he’s watched enough times to know the lines by heart. He takes comfort in knowing how their stories end. 

“No, listen,” he says. “They break up and they want to forget everything about, you know the relationship. The other person. So they find this place that does that. But then halfway through, the guy, he realises he doesn’t want to forget? So he’s just running through his memories with her, trying to save what they had but it can’t be stopped or something like that and he loses everything. But just before she disappears from his head she says, she says, meet me in something.”

“Mhmm,” Taeyong says, worming his way a little closer, so they’re nearly nose to nose, his hand curling against Jaehyun’s chest. Jaehyun tucks his hair behind his ear, and then he drops his hand to his shoulder and squeezes. 

“Meet me in Montauk. She says that. So when he wakes up he goes there and he actually meets her there and yeah that’s, that’s what the movie’s about. He wants to try again. Even though he knows how badly it ended the first time. They still find each other. Despite everything.”

  
September 2020

  
Jaehyun’s fingers hover hesitantly over the touchscreen keypad of the fifth floor apartment lock. He’s forgotten the code. Well, he hasn’t quite forgotten it so much as he can’t remember it. He thinks those two things are different. Forgetting is losing something familiar. Being unable to remember, that’s something unfamiliar to begin with.

I’ve forgotten your touch. I can’t remember the code.

He sighs, drops his hand to his pocket and gets his phone out. He sends off a brief text to Taeyong.

 _Code?_

He’s read his text, and Jaehyun’s waiting for a reply but instead he hears movement behind the door, a tritone beep and a mechanical whirring, and the door opens. Taeyong’s standing there, in white long sleeves and shorts. The weather’s getting colder, but he’ll still wear shorts, take control of the thermostat and complain that his feet are cold, but he won’t just wear pants and socks like everyone else. 

“You forgot the code?” Taeyong says. 

Jaehyun shrugs. He hasn’t been to see him all that much since they moved here. Thrice that he can remember. He’s not sure. He’s finding it a little hard to think with Taeyong standing there and looking at him with sleep-weighted lids, with soft dirty blond hair falling into his eyes and over his ears and down the nape of his neck. 

“Will you let me in?” He says. “Or am I being punished?”

Taeyong smiles, and foolishly, Jaehyun thinks he feels the wingbeats of butterflies in his stomach. He didn’t think he was still capable of being bowled over by Taeyong’s beauty, not after so many years. 

But Taeyong has proven him wrong, he likes proving him wrong. He likes making bets even if he’s always losing, because he likes the idea of winning more than actually winning. When he does win, he wields it like it’s power over Jaehyun, because it drives him nuts when he loses and he likes driving him nuts, too. 

That smile? It gets him weak in the knees, and he is powerless against it, but this is one victory Taeyong has never claimed. 

  
May 2016

  
“Look, you don’t have to - I know, I know I’m being stupid. I know. I won’t let it mess things up for us, but I just wanted you to know,” Jaehyun says. 

The room Taeyong shares with Doyoung gets hot, and the air conditioning isn’t doing much. He’s sweating. He’s not sure if it’s the heat or if he’s just scared. 

He’s sure of how he feels. And he’s sure Taeyong feels what he feels because he doesn’t look at anyone else like he looks at him. He doesn’t smile for anyone the way he smiles for him. He’s certain of that much even if they’ve never put it into words before. But Taeyong, he gets scared. He watches fireworks from his window but he never lights them himself, and he never goes into dark rooms without first fumbling for the light switch. He gets scared. 

Jaehyun’s face is hot, and his chest hurts, but it’s better that it hurts now. He blinks and he swallows and the tears threatening to spill are held at bay for the moment.

“I like you, hyung,” he says. “I don’t expect anything, I -

He’s not sure what else to say. The words slipped out of his mouth like some big slippery slug and there’s nothing beautiful about them. He’s looking at Taeyong like he’s unsure how he ever brought something so entirely abhorrent out of him, like he’s sorry that he put this slug in Taeyong’s hands and asked him to swallow it.

“I’m sorry,” Jaehyun says meekly. 

Taeyong’s looking at him with his lips pressed together and his brows drawn and his eyes just a little red rimmed. He moves closer, and Jaehyun thinks he’s going to hug him, to rub his back and say shh, don’t cry, because that’s what Taeyong does. Instead, he finds hands on his cheeks, and Taeyong’s lashes flutter, and his beautiful eyes close, and he leans up and presses a timid kiss to Jaehyun’s lips. 

It doesn’t last long, because Jaehyun stayed so still for it, like a startled rodent, and Taeyong hasn’t made a habit of kissing rats. 

Jaehyun has pictured this a hundred times before, but he’s still so unprepared for it. He just stands there with his hands hanging by his sides, sweating, too shocked to cry now. Taeyong’s so close, hands still cradling his face, and when he blinks, his lashes touch Jaehyun’s skin and he thinks that’s just mad. Never been kissed Jaehyun didn’t think that could happen. 

“Sorry,” Taeyong says. “Should have asked first.”

Jaehyun swallows thickly and his eyes go blurry and he blinks. He tried so hard not to cry, but it’s easy to cry with Taeyong. Two fat tears trickle down his face, one drops off his chin and one stays ticklish at a corner of his mouth. Taeyong thumbs at it. It’s a gesture so sweet, so delicate, just the way he’s always aching to be touched by him.

He wraps his arms around Taeyong’s waist, and Taeyong’s eyes are closed again. His brain is so foggy, and his movements are all shaky and he feels his hands going past the places he wants them to be and ending up wherever the tremor takes them, but he leans in and kisses Taeyong’s forehead, just as shaky as his hands.

It’s easy, then, for his lips to trail down the bridge of his nose and catch on the tip in an open kiss and fall to his lips. He kisses his cupid’s bow, and then the mole on his bottom lip, and then he kisses him on the mouth. It yields like melting chocolate and he kisses him gently. 

He’s eager, but afraid. He’s greedy for more, he wants to deepen their kiss and taste him, but he’s worried he’ll cross a line Taeyong’s not willing to cross right now, like it’ll scare him and he’ll push him away and he’ll never get to do this again. So he kisses him shallow and sweet and breathless and clueless, and he savours it like he’s a kid with his share of pudding. 

Taeyong isn’t kissing him anymore. He’s playing with the hair at Jaehyun’s nape, and he’s pulling away enough to look him in the eye.

“I like you,” Taeyong says. “So much. Don’t cry, Jaehyunie.”

But Jaehyun’s a big fucking baby around Taeyong. He cries anyway. He’s dumb as rocks, he thinks. Because Taeyong’s scared of dark rooms, but he’ll go in if it’s with Jaehyun. He’s afraid of fireworks, but he’ll hold a sparkler an arm’s length from his body is Jaehyun’s there to hold it with him. He gets scared, but he’s brave with Jaehyun. Maybe for Jaehyun. 

“Will you be with me then?” He mumbles, hands squeezing Taeyong’s hips. “Will you let me kiss you again?”

“Yeah,” he says. His hands squeezing Jaehyun’s shoulders the way Jaehyun’s squeezing his hips.

“What about everything else?” Jaehyun manages. 

Taeyong shrugs, flippant, lower lip jutting and head cocked to one side.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I think you’ll make me happier than everything else.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I didn’t know if I could make you happier than everything else,” he tells him. 

  
September 2020

  
He’s in the kitchen now, having trailed behind Taeyong, with his eyes on Taeyong’s ankles and that sharp cord of his Achilles tendon. The thought of his ankle in the sure grip of one hand is nearly involuntary. He used to like that, gripping him by the ankle so he couldn’t twist away from his ticklish kisses up his leg and his thigh, and everywhere he could reach. It comes with a familiar rush in his belly.

It always surprises him, that he could still want Taeyong after everything that happened between them, but Taeyong’s like that, so gorgeous, so unbearably beautiful, some strange thing about him that’s never dulled and never lost even in a crowd that lives on being beautiful. And because he’s had him, and he’s known him in all the ways so many dream of knowing him, and he knows what it can feel like with him, it shouldn’t surprise him that sometimes, he still thinks of kissing his thighs. 

“Just a second,” Taeyong says, and it snaps Jaehyun back. He takes a saucepan off the stove. “I was making hot chocolate. Made extra, do you want some?”

“No, thanks. I’m on a diet,” he says. 

Taeyong nods, and Jaehyun watches him pour his drink into his favourite cup. Purple brown and almost sickeningly sweet, he always makes it with too much sugar and too much cocoa, till its mouthfeel is more powder than liquid. 

He watches him put the pan in the sink, the hair he’s tucked taut behind his ear comes loose slowly, until it spills over and falls into his eyes. Jaehyun’s taken by the urge to tuck it back into place, but Taeyong beats him to it. 

He’s wrapping his long fingers around the cup handle now, and Jaehyun swallows thickly at the glint of gold on his right ring finger. 

He trails behind Taeyong again, to his room, to pick out something nice from Taeyong’s extensive wardrobe for him to wear to his meeting with the drama director tomorrow. That’s his veritable cellophane of an excuse to come to the downstairs dorm so late. They both know it’s an important meeting and one of the stylists will bring him something tomorrow that’s new and nice and picked out just for this occasion.

Still, he supposes this is some kind of fun, that he’s being see through and Taeyong doesn’t seem to mind. 

Taeyong’s kicked his bedroom door closed behind the two of them, and now he’s standing helplessly in the middle of the room. The two of them, and the silence of his bedroom. He clears his throat.

“Thought these were your style,” Taeyong says. He settles his hip against his table and points at the many sweaters and beanies laid out on his bed. “Engineering student Choi Minjun.”

“It’s Cha Minho, actually,” he says. It really doesn’t matter, but at least he has something to say now.

“Really? But Choi Minjun sounds cooler.”

“Well, I think Cha Minho could kick Choi Minjun’s ass. He’s way cooler,” he says. He feels stupid the minute he says it, but Taeyong has always thought he’s hilarious. 

He giggles his inward laugh, where his eyes disappear and his whole body leans into laughter. He has to set his cup down so he doesn’t end up with hot chocolate all over his shirt.

“You know what, Jeong Jaehyun is the coolest,” Taeyong says, and the muscles at the angles of Jaehyun’s mouth are fatigued from fighting back a smile.

In a miserable effort to seem at ease, he picks up a soft pink beanie that he tried to appropriate a while ago, only to be directed to the store and told to buy himself one. 

_But Hyung, I like this one_ , he tried, but he was sent to the store anyway and he finally conceded to buying himself one. In black, because he’s leading man, first love, heartthrob Jeong Jaehyun and Jeong Jaehyun doesn’t buy pink things. He just borrows then indefinitely from his hyung. 

“You like that one,” Taeyong says. Fondly, Jaehyun thinks. 

He smiles. He does like it. He likes that Taeyong likes it. 

He holds up two finely knit sweaters against his chest.

“Which one?” He says.

“Black,” Taeyong tells him. He’s still looking at the beanie. “You’d better give that back.”

“I will, promise,” Jaehyun mumbles. He tosses the grey sweater back onto the bed. “I’ll take this one, then. You’re sure, right?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he says. He’s holding the edge of his table. Gold glinting stubbornly on his right ring finger. “You’ve decided then? You’re doing the drama?”

“Yeah,” he says. He’s making a conscious effort not to look at it, at the mean little glint of it, and he thinks maybe he’s giving himself away. He blinks once like it’s a reset button. “I think I was sure I’d do it from the start.”

“What are they waiting for then?” Taeyong says. He picks up his cup and forgets to drink. 

“They want to make it something bigger,” he says. He realises they’re having a conversation now, and it’s weird that he’s so far away, so he moves in a little closer. 

“Not a web drama but a real drama,” he adds.

“That’s great. That’s wonderful, you deserve bigger,” Taeyong says. He settles his cup back down, without having taken a sip, and he wonders briefly, if Taeyong’s nervous. “I really am proud of you. You’re cut from something different. You’re made for more.”

“You’re always saying things like that. You’re a big sap, you know that?” He says around a laugh. He liked hearing it, though. He missed hearing it. 

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” he says. Hands back by his sides, curling around the edge of the table.

The last time he stood like this in front of Taeyong, he kissed him. And then he turned him around and bent him over the table and fucked him. He can’t call it anything else when they cleaned up after and slept in different beds and woke up in the morning and pretended it never happened. 

“Hyung.”

“Mm.”

“You look really pretty,” he says. He lifts his hand to the few stray strands that keep getting in Taeyong’s eyes and he sweeps them off his forehead. Gently, he tucks that hair behind his ear and it’s an accident, but his fingertips brush over the shell of his ear, over the silver ring he’s been wearing in his helix piercing. It’s not his fault after, he can’t be held accountable for letting the tip of his index catch on the small constellation of silver on his earlobe. 

He smiles when he thinks of the day he got his first piercing. Eyes screwed shut and lips in a thin line and wait, wait I’m not ready, not yet, just - it’s done? That’s it? 

Taeyong’s looking up at him with his brows creased slightly, his eyes wide and swimming with all the little bits of light they’ve caught. Flustered. Ears reddening and a short moment away from a nervous giggle.

Taeyong laughs. Small and anxious. 

“What do you mean pretty?” He says. He straightens up and he probably expects Jaehyun to take a step back but he doesn’t, and now they’re even closer together than before.

“I’m so much bigger now. Manly,” he says, and he meets Jaehyun’s eyes for a second before looking down again, at his chest. His lashes look like lace like this. 

“Yeah, but you’re pretty,” he says. His hand rests comfortably on Taeyong’s shoulder. It’s a habit he hasn’t dropped. “It suits you. The hair, the weight, everything. You look good.”

“Thanks,” Taeyong says. It sounds a little feeble.

  
March 2017

  
“If I say something mean to you?” Taeyong says. 

“I’ll get an apology out of you. And then I’ll instate a sugar ban till i’m satisfied. You’ll drink Americanos only. Espresso shots if I’m extra mad,” Jaehyun replies.

He’s laying in Taeyong’s bed, by Taeyong’s side. They’ve got their feet up on the wall. He’s scrolling through Taeyong’s naver search results. Taeyong wanted to see for himself, but Jaehyun took his phone from him and said he’ll look at everything on his behalf, that he’d tell him if he found something that had even a grain of truth in it. Some measured criticism. Some honest advice. 

There’s nothing here but meanness. He’s swallowed so much vitriol he thinks his blood must have turned to acid.

“If everyone hates me forever?”

“That’s fine, I hate everyone anyway.”

“If… if I get boring?” Taeyong asks. 

“You weren’t put on earth to entertain me, hyung.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

Taeyong is looking at him now, instead of straight up at the ceiling like before. 

“If I change,” he says pointedly. “If I have nothing left to offer? If all I can do is talk about the weather and you look at me and think I’d rather die than speak another word with this man - 

“Hyung, I don’t harbour that much hostility for weather.”

Taeyong props himself up on his elbows like he’s getting ready for a fight and Jaehyun’s quick to backpedal, quick to bite back the laugh that threatens to jump out of him every time he teases Taeyong. 

“Don’t get mad,” he says. “I know what you mean. And I’ll have to think about that for a bit, so, can you ask me something else? I’ll tell you when I’m sure.”

“If I’m wrinkly?” Taeyong says. 

“Odds are I’ll be wrinkly, too.”

Taeyong flops back down with a resignation and a timidness that’s familiar and unwelcome to them both. 

“If I… think too much? If I ask you the same stuff all over again?” 

“I’ll tell you again,” Jaehyun says. He’s decided this endeavour is meaningless. That the hate he’s shielding Taeyong from is hurting him too. He locks the screen and tosses the phone aside. “You said it, yourself, you don’t clean your room one time and expect it to stay clean, right? You have to do it over and over.”

“And if I’m this much work all the fucking time?” Taeyong mumbles. He sounds more hurt than he’s been letting on. Smaller. More vulnerable. “If I’m always this unsure of everything, and this out of sorts and… if you get tired?”

In the narrow space between them both, Jaehyun’s hand finds Taeyong’s. It’s very warm, the way it gets when he’s terribly nervous. If he were to lay his head on Taeyong’s chest he’d hear his heart galloping, he’s sure of it. Maybe more of a flutter than a gallop because he’s built solid and strong but right now he looks like a baby bird and he thinks his heartbeat couldn’t sound more steadfast than a faint little flutter.

“It’s going to get better,” he says. Quiet, like he’s trying not to frighten his baby bird, like he’s trying not to scare off this firefly he’s trying to catch. Quiet and earnest, he wants him to know he’ll be safe with him. “I trust you, I trust that you’ll get the better of this.”

“I don’t trust myself very much right now - 

“Then I’ll trust you enough for both of us.”

Taeyong swallows thickly. He sees it, and he hears it. It sounds like it hurt to swallow. He’s looking at him now. There’s a quiver to his lashes, a nearly imperceptible twitch to the corner of his mouth. 

“Won’t you get tired?” Taeyong says.

“I might,” he says. He squeezes his hand once. “I might have to ask you these things myself some day. You’ll be the one with the answers then.”

Taeyong stays quiet, but he holds on to Jaehyun’s hand a little tighter than before. As if the two of them were walking through Saturday night Itaewon and he doesn’t want to lose him in the crowd.

“I’ll think of some,” Taeyong says, and he goes back to staring at the ceiling. 

“Mhmm,” Jaehyun says, planting his foot on top of Taeyong’s as if to say he’s not going anywhere.

“I love you,” Taeyong says.

“I love you, too.”

  
February 2018

  
“Ow,” Taeyong says flatly. “Ouch. Ow.”

“Just wear button downs for the next couple of days,” Jaehyun says, as evenly as he can while peeling Taeyong’s t shirt off, as gently as he can. His gentlest is not gentle enough, clearly, because it’s cold in this bathroom, but Taeyong has a sheen of sweat on his skin. He’s in pain.

“Stop talking sense. I’m going to get mad.”

Jaehyun grins. “You just want to be mad at me today.”

“I’m mad at everything today,” Taeyong says miserably. His head is now wrapped in inside-out t shirt and his voice is comically muffled.

Jaehyun hooks his fingers around his shirt collar, pulls it wide and slips it off his head. The menthol smell of Taeyong’s pain patch irritates his nose and he scrunches it and sniffs.

“We did it,” he says. “Now sit. Shower time.”

“You’re really doing this? You don’t have to,” Taeyong says, but he sits obediently on the red Ikea stool with his hands clasped and jammed between his thighs and his toes curling against the tile flooring. He looks like a kid.

“I’m really doing this,” Jaehyun says. 

He peels off the pain patch on his back and crumples it in on its sticky side. He tosses it in the general direction of the trashcan. He knows Taeyong would give him grief about it if he weren’t so tired. 

“Okay, where do you start?” He says.

“Usually, I summon a demon first,” Taeyong supplies.

“Oh, good. I’m good at that,” Jaehyun tells him, and Taeyong giggles. “But I left all my demon summoning stuff in my room. How ‘bout I wash your hair first?”

He grins and nods and sits quietly while Jaehyun checks the temperature of the water. Jaehyun tries to angle the hand shower so he doesn’t get himself wet but the hem of his t shirt is already drenched and he gives up. Slowly, carefully, he combs his hand through Taeyong’s hair and lets the water run through it, and down his neck and down his back. Slowly, carefully, he lathers his hair up. He has to wear gloves while he does it because this will be his first wash since he coloured his hair this jewel toned red and he warned him that the colour will run and it’ll stain his hands if he’s not careful. 

It feels very strangely intimate, fingertips rubbing soothing circles into his scalp, and Taeyong, despite being apologetic and fidgety while Jaehyun undressed him, relaxes quickly. He sags against him a little, and gets bright pink lather on his t shirt, but Jaehyun doesn’t tell him. He just stands there like a pillar and lets him lean against him, and lets his fingers comb through his beautiful berry red hair.

“How’s ennana been these days?” Taeyong asks. “Doyoungie said it was great when he was on. I missed it.”

“Did he really?” Jaehyun says. “I gave him a hard time, I really made fun of him too much. He was this close beating my ass.”

Taeyong laughs. 

“John hyung being on my side was the only thing that saved me,” he says.

“John hyung,” Taeyong says absentmindedly. He gets quiet for a bit. His reflection in the glass walls of the shower shows him chewing on his lip. 

“It’s your birthday soon,” he says.

“Mm. It’s a big one. What are you going to give me?”

“Kisses,” Taeyong says. “Kisses for my Jae-D.”

Jaehyun laughs lightly, and he nudges him forward. He checks the water again, and then he starts rinsing his hair out. He patiently works his fingers through his hair, but the water runs steadily pink, on and on, and then he makes a baffled sound, and Taeyong bursts into laughter.

“It looks like I survived a knife fight,” he says. 

Jaehyun grins. Peals of his laughter echoing off bathroom tiles, running water, the chemical smell of hair dye, the sweet smell of his shampoo. He supposes this could be a birthday present all by itself. 

When it’s all done, conditioner and everything, he slaps a towel down over his head, because little pink rivulets are still trickling down his neck and his forehead, and Taeyong’s starting to worry about turning pink. 

“I’m never doing red again,” he says. 

“It suits you, though,” Jaehyun says. “You look unreal.”

Taeyong gets quiet again. And that’s strange, Jaehyun knows, this is quieter than his quiet days. But he knows it must be the pain and the exhaustion, so Jaehyun soaps him up and scrubs his back and scrubs his feet, too, despite his attempts at protest. 

“I’d rather look real to you,” he says, finally, quietly.

He looks up, from where he’s crouched with Taeyong’s soapy foot in his hand, he lets his gaze travel up his body. Up his lean, strong legs, knees bruised, narrow hips, slender waist, ribs and collarbones just beneath skin, arms skinnier than ever before. His hair, wet strands finger combed back, his narrow, sharp face. For a second, he thinks he’s never looked more starved and more in pain and more chemically processed than this. 

He smiles, because he’s not sure what else to do, and he presses a gentle kiss to his soapy knee. 

For reasons he doesn’t understand, he asks, “Did you tell manager hyung? That you’re hurt?”

Taeyong shakes his head.

  
September 2020

  
Taeyong is someone soft, beautiful, deeply insecure, deeply sensitive. someone who craves attention from all, and affection from many. He’ll see something in people, something small and unnoticed by most, and he’ll fall a little in love with it. And that’s enough for him. To him, now, they’re good and they’re beautiful, and he’ll be their friend. Their pet, anything they need him to be, really. He’ll let them tease him, appease him, trip over themselves trying to impress him, and he doesn’t even know this is something he does. He doesn’t do it on purpose. 

He just wants sweetness and indulgence and he wants someone to see him, the way he sees them, all his efforts and all his suffering. He wants to hear them say what a lovely, special thing you are, you’ve suffered so much, you’ve done so well, you’ve done enough. He’ll tuck himself under the arm of every hyung he works with, till he’s heard it enough times to feel at ease with himself. He doesn’t mean anything by it.

It took Jaehyun falling in love with him to figure that out. No, it took falling in love, stepping up to fill a role in his life that Jaehyun didn’t understand, losing him, and agonizing over losing him for well over a year before he finally understood what Taeyong needs, what he failed to give him.

Taeyong has always loved being loved, and he seems so at ease with himself these days, he can’t help but wonder if he’s found someone who suits him better than Jaehyun did. 

Taeyong has always loved being loved, but not once at the cost of Jaehyun’s feelings. He was and is unfailingly loyal that way. So today, if there’s someone in Taeyong’s life, someone who put that gold ring on his finger, Taeyong wouldn’t let Jaehyun so close, would he? He would shift delicately, imperceptibly, but he’d draw a line between them and put him in his place. Like he used to when photographers and songwriters and other idols tried to press closer, back when they were in love. 

He should just ask. 

“Jaehyunie, honestly, do you like it or does it look -

“I like your ring,” he blurts out. It’s not really a question, and Taeyong doesn’t really owe him an answer. 

“What?” Taeyong says. “Right, thanks. Baekhyun hyung gave it to me.”

That’s answer enough. He was hoping he’d say he bought it himself. Maybe even that Doyoung gave it to him. He wasn’t quite ready to hear this, and his heart sinks. It’s stupid of him, and it’s stupid of his heart. 

“Because he didn’t get me anything for my birthday,” Taeyong continues.

But Jaehyun isn't quite listening. Baekhyun hyung is exactly what he was worried about. He’s just raw talent, he’s effortlessly funny, and sweet. Sensitive. He coddles Taeyong just the way he wants it, Taeyongie this Taeyongie that, and Taeyongie turns jelly legged and smiles brighter than the sun around him. 

He heard they shared a bed when they were filming. He heard Taeyong couldn’t stop laughing when he was with him. He’s just not sure why it feels like a bad thing. 

“It’s really pretty,” he says. “Suits you.”

Taeyong smiles. And that’s it, that’s why it feels like a bad thing. He’s still bowled over by Taeyong’s smile. And that’s why he shouldn’t have slept with him that night in Japan and he shouldn’t have sang him a song for his birthday and he shouldn’t be here now. 

“I’ll just get going then,” he says. He holds up the beanie and grins. “Thanks, I’ll return this later.”

“Jaehyun-ah,” Taeyong says. And it comes out a little sticky, like he didn’t want to say it. Had second thoughts halfway out of his mouth. 

“I swear I’ll return -

“Don’t go,” he says.

And of all the things Jaehyun was prepared to hear, this didn’t figure on his list. 

  
December 2018

  
Taeyong’s fork sinks into chocolate cake and takes off a chunk too big to be one bite, mouth open wide to accommodate the size, chipmunk cheeks. 

“You don’t understand,” he says. “I hate being skinny.”

“Promise me you won’t regret it?” Jaehyun says. They’re siting side by side on the floor, Taeyong eating his cake, and Jaehyun plays PUBG on his phone. “We’re supposed to be losing weight before the tour.”

Taeyong sets his fork down quietly. He’s chewing what’s in his mouth and swallowing.

“I think i might disappear,” Taeyong says. 

Jaehyun glances at him quickly, but his face is unreadable and his voice was even and he said it like it was a matter of fact. His tongue is poking at the inside of his cheek now. 

He’s waiting for him to say something. To tie up his technicolor thoughts into a neat little parcel that black and white Jaehyun can swallow. But he doesn’t say anything more. He’s quiet for too long. Jaehyun doesn’t know if he’s touched a nerve. 

“What do you mean?” He prompts. 

“I don’t know how to - there’s something I’m not able to put into words -

The cake is still untouched, and Taeyong’s sitting cross legged, back hunched, head bowed on the floor in Jaehyun’s room. He’s not sure where this is going but it’s going somewhere. He doesn’t know if it’s something he said. 

He leaves his game, and his mind makes a quick, automatic trip to how many points he’s going to lose for it, but he quits anyway and puts his phone aside. 

“Take your time,” Jaehyun says. He squeezes Taeyong’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Do I look like I used to?” Taeyong asked. “Like when you asked me out?”

He’s still not sure what he means, but he supposes he can start by answering his question.

“You look like you,” he says.

“I don’t feel like me. I feel like, like there’s a lot of me that I don’t own - sometimes I’m not even sure I’m breathing - Jaehyun, do you know what I mean?”

He shifts uncomfortably. He’s nervous, for some reason, woefully ill equipped for this conversation. He has no fucking idea what he means and he doesn’t know how serious he is about this because he sounds like he’s asking him if he’s ever eaten sugar apples.

“I’m just all wrapped up like a mummy or something,” he says. And that’s when Jaehyun hears the strain in his voice. “I’m tied up all in knots. I’m just shrivelling up, you know?”

“Hyung, you’re not -

“People eat. I want to eat. So I will. And I want - I want to take up space.”

Jaehyun moves to sit across from him, his hands on Taeyong’s knees.

“You do. Just like all the rest of us,” he tells him.

“No. Just a bit more and I’ll disappear.”

“Hyung,” he says. Fingers brushing bleach dry hair off his forehead. He’s been unkind to his hair this past year, pink again for the tour. “I won’t let you disappear. You’re here with me.”

He thinks that’s what he wanted to hear. What he needed to hear. He isn’t sure what else to say, so he tells him he loves him, and Taeyong asks him why.

  
September 2020

  
“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever,” Taeyong says.

Jaehyun unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth, where he’d pressed it, a proxy for a clenched fist without seeming outwardly on edge. He’s good at that, looking unbothered. 

“We’ve been busy, hyung,” he says. 

“I wanted to talk to you. About stuff. But I don’t - I suppose I didn’t know where you were and I didn’t think it was fair to bring all of that up again, especially if you’d moved on, you know? What’s the point then, I guess?”

“You want to talk about us?”

“Is that okay?” He says. “I don’t want to be selfish or presumptuous, I - but you asked about the ring so I thought maybe you’re still - you know, maybe there’s still stuff you want to talk about? Things we haven’t resolved or -

“Like what?” He says. 

“Are you jealous?”

There’s a long, prickly silence after that. Taeyong isn’t fumbling his way through what he wants to say and Jaehyun is left gawping at him. He didn’t think Taeyong was capable of being so direct. 

It’s not fair of him to ask that. Not when he’s willing to respect the boundaries he laid down so clearly for the two of them the last time he found himself confused about where they stood in each other’s lives. Yeah, he’s here, and yeah he wanted to know if Taeyong was moving on, and when he thought that he was, he was going to walk away. This isn’t fair. This isn’t fun. 

“Hyung,” he says. “You said. We said we’d stop.”

“We didn’t stop. We never stopped. We - that night -

“You said you didn’t want -

“My birthday?” Taeyong says. 

There’s another silence, but it’s more pensive now than before.

“You’re wearing a ring someone else gave you, I guess I don’t know what that means.”

“It means it’s a pretty ring and I like how it looks on my hand,” he tells him. 

“You - you don’t have to tell me that. You told me you didn’t want us anymore. Even that night in Japan, you said you didn’t want it to change anything between us. On your birthday, you told me all the reasons we didn’t work out. So it shouldn’t matter, what the ring is and it shouldn’t matter how I feel because you don’t owe me any explanations anymore.”

“You asked,” he says.

“I didn’t,” Jaehyun says. “Is that it? That was the talk?”

Taeyong looks from Jaehyun to his feet and then he shrugs.

“I guess, yeah.”

Jaehyun should go now, it’s as easy as that. Ring or no ring, moving on or not, there’s no relationship between them anymore, there’s no hostility, either, and he should leave it there. But he doesn’t, because he’s dumb as rocks and he’s still bowled over every time Taeyong smiles. 

“Did you miss me at all?” He says. “You can say no.”

“I thought you said it doesn’t matter now?” Taeyong says. It’s fair. He’s not being very consistent. He ignores it. 

“Do you still?” He asks. 

“You’re the one who forgot the code.”

“So I am being punished.”

“Jaehyun, I’m just trying to say -

“You’re saying you were miserable with me and you’re better now. Somebody did what I couldn’t do for you. I’m glad,” he says. “I really am glad you’re better.”

“Jaehyun.”

“I don’t need to know anything else.”

But he still hasn’t left. Taeyong opens his mouth as if to say something, and then closes it again. Second thoughts. He sees him get that look in his eye, when he needs to figure out how to say what he’s feeling. 

“I know I hurt you when I ended things between us, and I tried my best to tell you why I felt like I had to do it,” he says. “And the last time we met, the things we talked about, I thought maybe - and now you’re here. You asked about the ring, I thought it meant - I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. I just missed you. But if you think it doesn’t matter, and you think I’m being unfair or indecisive… then I’m sorry. You’re here for a sweater and that’s that.”

That’s not that. He’s not fucking here for a sweater. He’s here to figure out if there’s still hope for them, and he’s here to figure out if he wants there to be hope for them. 

If there’s something Jaehyun has learnt from the months since they broke up, it’s to say what he’s feeling, and to ask what Taeyong wants. He’s not wired like that, so it takes him time, but he gets there haltingly. After insisting it doesn’t matter to him, that it shouldn’t matter to him, when he hears Taeyong say he’s missed him, he gets there.

“I’m mad it wasn’t me,” Jaehyun says. 

“I’m mad it wasn’t you, too,” Taeyong replies.

He’s not sure what happens in the next few moments, not sure exactly how he has moved but he’s acutely aware of the fact that he is moving, that Taeyong’s unbearably close, that his hands have cupped his face and he can feel the gold band of that ring on his left cheek. And then his eyes flutter shut and it’s only a moment before his lips have met Taeyong’s.

There’s nothing left for him to do but hold him, kiss him. His hands grip desperately at his waist, and he leans into that kiss, mouths meeting eagerly, feverishly, too complicated to call it want. There’s something more frustrated about it, more like longing than anything he’s ever felt.

  
April 2019 

  
“Say it, this is your dream and you won’t let anyone take it from you.”

“Hyung, what are you -

“Just say it, please,” Taeyong says. 

Jaehyun looks him in the eye, and Taeyong meets his gaze, unflinching, He’s never had trouble looking Jaehyun in the eye. But Jaehyun, he can never look at him for too long. He always feels exposed in some way, always caught with his ears warming and his neck colouring. He drops his gaze, down to where their knees are touching, to their clasped hands.

“This is my dream and I won’t let anyone take it from me,” he says. He doesn’t know where this is going. It’s nowhere good. He knows that look in Taeyong’s eye. He knows the quiver of his lashes and the twitch of his lips. 

“And you mean it?”

“Of course, hyung, can you please tell me what this is about?”

Taeyong’s chewing on his bottom lip. He’ll break skin at this rate, and Jaehyun fights the urge to thumb gently at a corner of his reddened mouth the way he’s used to doing, to remind him he’ll only hurt himself like this. But Taeyong bows his head, and he’s holding his hands so tightly.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he says.

“Do what?” Jaehyun says, stupid, deer in the headlights. His heart is growing heavy, and it sits like a lump of coal in his belly. He feels unnerved, ill at ease. He’s not sure what Taeyong is walking away from.

“Us,” Taeyong tells him. 

He’s baffled, for a moment, looking down at their hands. Taeyong’s holding on so tight.

“What?” He manages. 

“I think we should break up,” Taeyong says.

“Why?” He says. He sounds confused more than anything, still surfing the white noise in the wake of bad news. How deep loss runs isn’t something fathomed in a moment. 

Taeyong lets out a shuddering breath and holds his hands a little tighter. Jaehyun returns the grip, because that’s what he’s used to doing, what became habit over the years they’ve spent together.

“I’m not what you want.”

“Wait, no, hold on. Are you serious? You’re not joking, you really -

“Jaehyun -

“Why?” He says again. And this time it sounds a little more like what he should be feeling. 

“I’m not. Jaehyun, you don’t want me.”

He’s not even sure what to say for a minute. Conversations with Taeyong are always unpredictable and he’s learned to stay afloat in the tumbling eddies of Taeyong’s thoughts, but this? He feels very much like he’s drowning.

“Why do you think that?” He tries. 

“You like things that are simple and clean and you’re so no nonsense. You just - 

It sounds rehearsed. He has a speech then? To make it easier for him to understand why he wants to leave him?

“You just work, and you come home and you have your vinyls and your black coffee and your wine and you like that you speak English, and you go about your day like it’s easy. You’re proud of the picture you have of yourself. ”

“I do,” he says. “I am.”

“I’m none of those things,” Taeyong says quietly. “Never have been. I get messy. I get stuck on things. I feel like shit for weeks on end. I’m too much sometimes. Noisy, and, and goofy. I can barely speak English. I hate black coffee. I can’t drink. I can’t talk to people. You don’t like these things about me.”

He knows what he’s talking about. Who he’s talking about. 

“I never said that. I never did anything that made you feel like that. What is this, hyung?” He says. He’s as angry as he is hurt and he isn’t trying to hide it anymore, eyes stinging hot, and he blinks furiously. 

“You didn’t, and you never will. You’re never honest with yourself and you were always far too nice to me.”

He takes his hands out of Taeyong’s, fingers interlinked in his lap, so hard his rings did into his skin. He thinks he could cry but he doesn’t want to let Taeyong see. 

“I’m honest with you,” he says. And he means honest in every sense. Faithful. Unwavering. Unflinchingly truthful about where his heart is and it’s always with Taeyong. 

There’s a moment’s pause, a beat of silence and then two, then three, then Taeyong bows his head and sniffles. 

“Can I think about this? Can we, please, think this over some more -

“I’m sure, Jaehyun. I don’t want to be together anymore.”

  
September 2020

  
Taeyong’s hands are sliding down his neck and over his shoulders, and it’s so painfully familiar. It’s always like this, he’s always thinking about the last time they did this knowing they’d do it again. Last year, spring, they were drunk and clumsy and Taeyong kissed him like this, hands on his shoulders and mouth pliant, loosening under him and his lips and his tongue. He was too drunk to remember to be quiet, and he whined so loud when Jaehyun fucked into him, he had to smother the sound with his palm, both burying muted giggles on opposite faces of Jaehyun’s hand. Some time in the comedown, already feeling the ache of having to leave his bed soon, he heard Taeyong whisper I miss you. I’m right here, I’m here with you, he told him. I miss you all the fucking time, Taeyong said to him. 

A month from that night, Taeyong would sit on Jaehyun’s bed and tell him he thinks they should stop now. That he doesn’t want to rely on him anymore, that he’s tired of being in love and still finding himself alone. He’d say he doesn’t blame him for the way he feels, it’s not anybody’s fault, it’s hard. It’s hard to be in love, it’s hard for Jaehyun to be there for him, to say the things he needs him to say when it all has to be a secret. Their lives leave no room for secrets. He’d tell him he feels lonely. That he thinks he’d be less lonely on his own. All Jaehyun would hear is, I miss you all the fucking time, and he’d hate him for wanting to stop trying but he wouldn’t know how to make it better. 

Jaehyun cried in hot tears blinked back, pursed lips and thick swallows and squared shoulders, defiant still, with all his hurt burning on his tongue and in the fatigued muscles he’d tightened in his jaw, his neck, his shoulders and his chest. 

Taeyong cried the way he always does, pink and childlike. Lower lip tucked between his teeth and brows knit and eyes bigger than ever, both cheeks wet, the back of his hand wet from the number of times he ran it over his face. 

Jaehyun hates that night. The thought of it. Even the clothes Taeyong wore that night. He doesn’t like seeing him in them. He’s glad they don’t share a dorm anymore. 

Taeyong’s arms link around his shoulders, stepping closer, and Jaehyun’s hands are on the small of his back. Where his t shirt lifts. Where skin meets skin. It drives him up the wall. His hand climbs his bare skin, up the curve of his spine till it rests between his shoulder blades and that means he’s got his arms wrapped around him in a crushing embrace and the only place Taeyong can go is closer. Closer to him. Gathered close like an armful of flowers he’s picked, he’s dipping his head and drinking him in, like he’s breathing in their summer scent. 

“Door,” Taeyong breathes. “Door’s unlocked.”

He breaks the kiss, and he loosens the embrace so he isn’t clutching him to his chest with quite the same desperation. He finds that he can’t let go. Can’t go far from his lips. So he stays, so close their lashes could brush, and he lets Taeyong press their cheeks together once, lets him kiss him tenderly once, and then twice, his hand sliding into his hair. He’s crowding him back towards his door. They have to lock it, and Jaehyun doesn’t want to let go. He smiles despite himself when he feels his back hit the door. Taeyong twists the lock, and they hear it click. 

He’s struck by the finality of that sound. This is no longer a stumble in the dark, this is the two of them and their deliberate descent into the murky waters of what was. He’s agreeing to this. Taeyong’s asking for this. He doesn’t know why. 

He knows why. They were in love. A year apart doesn’t change that they were helplessly in love with each other. Taeyong loved him, in the sweet, vulnerable way that he loves things, like a frightened little boy with a baby bird in his hands, helplessly. He loved Taeyong, in the quiet, guarded way that he knows how to love, like an old soul, unwavering, sincere. There was never a time in his life he felt himself helpless before the day he realized he was in love with him. 

He’s kissing him again, strong, hungry. Jaehyun isn’t ready for the way his tongue slides against his own. He’s tasting hot chocolate. His arm slides higher, till his hand emerges from Taeyong’s shirt collar, so he can grip him by the back of his neck and take back some control. Taeyong hums, he likes that, has always liked being gripped by the back of the neck, by his hips, by his waist. 

He can feel his arousal, pressed up against his own. Four layers of fabric between them but he can still feel the curve of it. He lets his free hand trail back down his spine, stopping once to squeeze his waist, then down till he’s letting his palm slip over the smooth jersey material of his shorts. He fits his hand over his ass and kneads, and Taeyong’s breath hitches, his kisses stuttering. 

“What do you want to do?” Jaehyun asks. He knows where this is going, he’s been with Taeyong long enough to know when he wants to him to fuck him thoroughly and when he just wants to kiss and go to bed. He knows Taeyong’s seconds from sinking to his knees or guiding his hand to slip inside his shorts. He’s not asking because he doesn’t know, he’s asking because he wants to know he’s sure. He’s asking so that tomorrow, if Taeyong tells him he doesn’t want him, he can tell him you did want me, you do want me, stop hiding. 

Taeyong’s kissing him absently, mouthing at his jaw. His hand is trailing across his waistband, the tip of his index making an excursion down to trace the shape of his arousal. He swallows a groan, but he can’t help the way he twitches under his touch. 

“Should I use my mouth?” He says. 

Jaehyun nearly moans at that. He has these things that he says because he’s too shy to say the real thing, too shy to say something like should I suck you off, but what he ends up saying always sounds dirtier, always makes his neck warm and his belly drop. 

“Do you want to?” He breathes, his lips brushing Taeyong’s, both hands settling on his hips.

“Yeah,” Taeyong says. 

Jaehyun nods. Taeyong is pulling away from him, and he can’t help but follow, can’t help but keep their lips close enough to be an almost kiss, but they’re turning around now, and the back of his knees have hit Taeyong’s bed. 

Taeyong has hooked his fingers into Jaehyun’s pjs, he’s tugging them down but it’s not working. There’s a knot at the waist he has to undo but he’s impatient. Jaehyun bites back a smile and unties it for him, and finally, he manages to slip it down his thighs. 

He’s tugging at the hem of his t shirt. He’s not sure if he’s saying sit down or take it off, so he does both and then he kicks off the pants pooled around his ankle. Sitting on the edge of Taeyong’s bed, entirely naked, apart from being something he was completely unprepared to be doing tonight, is equal parts arousing and embarrassing. 

He looks down at his feet briefly, and then back up at Taeyong. He’s pulling his t shirt off, too, and now it’s not so embarrassing, just painfully arousing. He’s so broad now. He’s always been broad shouldered but this is new. He’s so soft, light hair in gentle waves tucked behind his ears, doe eyes and delicately shaped lips, but he’s built so strong and it always makes Jaehyun’s body thrum. 

Taeyong’s going down now, knees between Jaehyun’s feet, hands on Jaehyun’s thighs. Gold glints on his right ring finger and he covers that hand with his own. 

Taeyong leans in, mouths a few lazy kisses over his abs, and Jaehyun shudders under his lips. His hand tangles in his hair even as Taeyong’s head dips lower, lips latching on his belly button. He gives it a little suck, and all the muscles in Jaehyun’s abdomen tighten at that. Lips down his happy trail, lips on his inner thighs, lips on the tip of his cock. Taeyong lets him past his lips now, just the tip in his mouth, one hand wrapped around the length of it. He missed this, god, he hasn’t felt like this in so long. 

Taeyong sinks lower, takes more of him in his mouth and he loves that slick, warm slide between the flat of his tongue and the roof of his mouth, fuck. He’s bobbing his head now, hair coming loose and falling into his eyes and Jaehyun combs it back, keeps it off his face.

Taeyong takes him deeper every time he sinks down, deeper and deeper till his nose touches the dark, soft curls at the base of his cock. Briefly, he’s apologetic, because he’s usually groomed to some extent for Taeyong, and that’s only because he realised that Taeyong does it for him too. But nobody’s seen him naked in just about 9 months and he’s sort of lost the habit. 

He doesn’t seem to mind. He swallows around him, throat fluttering, and Jaehyun forgets he needs to be quiet. He moans, hand tightening in his gorgeous hair, hips bucking up slightly, but it’s enough to make Taeyong gag. 

“Sorry,” he breathes, because Taeyong’s brow is creased and his eyes have gone a little glassy.

He doesn’t break his rhythm. And his toes are curled. Jaehyun’s head spins, because Taeyong’s always like this, the most aroused when he finds he’s done something that pleases Jaehyun. Always, the most pliant when Jaehyun moans and tells him he’s good, that he’s the best. He’ll trip over himself trying to outdo what he just did, he knows, so he’s not surprised when Taeyong’s mouth pulls off his length. Not surprised when he spits in his palm, quiet and shy because he’s still the same Taeyong who giggles nervously when the boys talk about sex, and takes his length in a tight grip. That’s enough to make him moan again, but it’s not enough for Taeyong. 

All the breath leaves Jaehyun’s chest and all in a big fucking rush because Taeyong’s pulling him to the edge of the bed, and Taeyong, his tongue is licking a thick stripe over his balls. Jaehyun swallows, and his throat is still dry. Taeyong’s still stroking him, and his balls are still in Taeyong’s mouth, and the only sounds in this small room are wet and unholy. His thighs tremble, his toes curl into the floor. It’s not often Taeyong does this, too reserved for things like these, and that’s what’s nuts about it. That he’ll wake up tomorrow and the whole world will baby him and give in to his big doe eyes and sweet smile and they’ll be all about his fashion and his creativity and his work ethic and nobody would guess that the night before saw him on his knees with his mouth full. 

“Get up here,” he says. His hand tightens in his hair, urging him to move. 

Taeyong pulls off, leaves his length glistening wet, his own mouth red and slippery. He gets to his feet, a little unsteady, and he’s barely upright before Jaehyun pulls his shorts off. Hands on his jutting hipbones, trailing heavy, burning paths over his thighs.

His length is flushed a dusky pink, hanging heavy and untouched between his legs. He wraps his hand around it, and Taeyong makes a delicious little sound and steadies himself on Jaehyun’s shoulders. He gives him a few languid strokes, a few delicate kisses to his hips before Taeyong seems to decide he can’t stay standing. His grip on his shoulders has been tightening steadily, but even that’s not enough. When he’s flooded with emotion, joy or sorrow or even arousal, it’s like he loses all the strength in his legs, and he crumples under it. 

He climbs onto Jaehyun’s lap, and Jaehyun smiles. He can feel it on his lips, that it’s the kind of smile Taeyong used to call his _baramdungi_ smile. He holds him tight by the waist and settles him on the bed.

Taeyong shifts further up the bed with heels and elbows digging into the mattress to give him leverage. Jaehyun follows him, palms planted on either side of his torso, he slots his thigh between Taeyong’s. He has no idea what Taeyong’s seeing when he looks up at him, does he look predatory to him, does he look like nineteen year old who confessed his feelings miserably and tearfully, fully prepared for rejection, only to be kissed till it sank in and he kissed him back. Does he still look bitter, he wonders.

Maybe it’s a bit of everything.

  
August 2019 

  
_Jaehyunie fighting!_ and a drawing of a firefly in black marker on a purple post it. 

He’s been sitting on his floor with his box of miscellaneous stuff collected over his years of living in the dorm and he doesn’t know how long he’s been here. He doesn’t know if it’s good luck or misfortune that he stumbled upon these things in the middle of moving to their new dorm. 

More misfortune, he thinks, because the feeling in his chest is more like a sickness than an emotion even as his mouth stays smiling and his mind flits from one cherished memory to another.

 _Sorry about today. Didn’t mean to be such a killjoy. I’ll make it up to you,_ on a cherry shaped little note. Tiny heart stickers and a lemon yellow smiley face.

He laughs lightly. Taeyong has always been cute. That one must have been some time in 2017, that was the era of cherry shaped notes. He hasn’t the slightest idea what it’s about, though.

_This is Jaehyun’s!_

Taeyong stuck this on a bottle of banana milk and left it in the dorm fridge. This was before debut. He’s not sure exactly when, but Jaehyun had complained to him about the other hyungs stealing his banana milk, and the next morning, he found this.

_You’ll do well tomorrow, Jaehyunie. I know what I see in you_

_Jaehyunie, you’re very fucking cute_

_I won fair and square you’d better pay up_

_You’re cut from something different, Jeong Yuno. Just trust hyung. Just trust me_

_Made extra. Eat before bed_

He’s been smiling since he picked up these little pieces of paper and he doesn’t even know it. This was it, this was how he ended up falling in love. All of it is right here. 

_Jeong Yuno, I love you to death_. Another firefly. A daisy. 

_I’m mad. Say you’re sorry or else_

He laughs again, because this was when Johnny and he trapped a pink haired and pink cheeked Taeyong in the space between their beds and laughed till their bellies hurt before finally helping him out. He looked like a weatherbeaten bird and he pouted all evening and left this very threatening note in the book he was reading then. 

_Feeling a little out of sorts today. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll be better in the morning, I promise. Love you Jeong Jae_

_Miss you_ , and a drawing of a pouty Taeyong. At first he wasn’t sure if Taeyong had drawn himself or if it was supposed to be Jaehyun. Taeyong said obviously, this is Lee Taeyong. It’s all in the eyebrows. 

_Jaehyun. I love you,_ and for some reason, a doodle of a shark. 

He sits there and stares at it for a while. His crude handwriting and his love for all things pink and cute and happy. Post its in every colour of the rainbow. Some safe for the world to see. Some deeply private things he’d put down on paper and he’d fold up and leave in his wallet. He lay meandering and moody in his past, like a river, like a certainty, different from one day to the next but always there. 

He’s been tearing himself to bits trying to figure out what went wrong, and he hasn’t had a spare moment to feel his absence. He hasn’t let himself miss him before this. All consumed in being angry at him. All eaten up by hating what he did to them. 

_Jaehyun, I love you_ , and that stupid beady eyed shark staring up at him from a square of orange paper, and it’s struck him, finally, what he had. What he’s lost. 

He doesn’t mean for it to happen, but he doesn’t fight it, either, when he realises his eyes are stinging and his chest feels stranger than before. He doesn’t blink the tears back, and he lets his cheeks wet, sucks in deep, burning breaths. He just sits there and cries with a palm pressed over his mouth as if to muffle the sounds, but he doesn’t try to stop.

Only when he hears voices somewhere in the dorm, only when he thinks he might be seen does he run his sleeve over his face to try and dry it. Only then, he clears his throat and shoves all those notes back into the box and he busies himself with looking at some fan letters. 

When the door swings open, it’s Johnny and Haechan, and they’re kind enough not to point out his swollen, red eyes, or the wetness on his sleeve. 

Haechan leaves quickly, sure that he’s not wanted. But Johnny lingers, and talks, and before he leaves, he wraps his arms around him and tells him he’s here. 

His hands, sturdy and warm on his back. Sturdy like the rest of him. Steady, like the sun, like a certainty, always light, always warm. He smells like coffee. He drinks wine like he’s drinking water. He gets drunk and he wants to slow dance to old love songs. He could love him, he thinks. He wouldn’t have to try very hard, and it wouldn’t be out of spite.

He could kiss him, too. Right now, he could kiss him. He’s not sure if Johnny wants him to, but he’s sure he wouldn’t hold it against him if he did. 

He doesn’t.

September 2020

  
Taeyong reaches up and pulls him down by the nape, meshes their mouths together, still faintly tasting of hot chocolate. Jaehyun ruts down against him, and Taeyong’s just as desperate because he ruts up against his thigh. Sweet little sounds are slipping into his mouth and he wants them all. He doesn’t want to ask him to quiet down, but they’re not people who can afford to be loud about desire. 

“Put some music on,” he says.

Taeyong nods, and he’s reaching for his phone and tipping them both onto their sides. Jaehyun doesn’t stop to let him do what he just asked him to. He tugs him closer, in a graceless embrace, his hands clutching everywhere he can reach. His body was so familiar to him once, the taste of it, the scent of his skin, faint floral body wash everywhere, woody cologne at his wrists and his neck. And his own smell, what used to linger on Jaehyun’s clothes for those few minutes after he’d leave his arms.

Taeyong’s giggling against his cheek and pulling away from their kiss. “Let me do the thing,” he says, propped up on one elbow to shift his focus to his phone but Jaehyun’s so fucking impatient. His arm winds back around his slim waist and he presses big, sloppy open mouthed kisses down his neck. Taeyong’s moan gets swallowed up in the song that starts playing on his Bluetooth speakers. He’s pretty sure Haechan’s trying to sleep and he’s pretty sure it’s a little too loud but he doesn’t care. Haechan won’t bother walking all the way here to tell him to turn it down.

Taeyong’s skin is so warm, especially his palms when he finds them on his shoulders. Skin so fucking warm and his collarbones, sharp and elegant, nipples small and pink brown. He remembers rubbing them hard through a thin t shirt on a summer afternoon, his mouth teasing them raw on a rainy evening. His body, familiar and foreign at once. He claims it as retribution even when he’s spent the past year telling himself he wasn’t wronged. 

He supposes in a sense, he was, and in a sense he wasn’t.

He doesn’t let himself think for too long, and he keeps a loose grip around Taeyong’s length and strokes. 

Taeyong’s fallen back against the covers, soft blond hair in a halo around his face, his lashes fluttering and his palm tucked under the back of his neck. He looks nearly angelic. 

“Lube’s up there on the shelf. In the box under spongebob.”

Jaehyun doesn’t have to move too much, it’s just by the bed. He shifts spongebob out of the way unapologetically, and he ends up falling face down by Taeyong’s knee and he doesn’t bother putting him back. 

Fingers covered in lube, he slips one index past that tight ring of muscle, and he tried his best to think of this, conjure up the feeling when he couldn’t sleep, cock hard and flushed in his spit slicked hand, eyes closed, lights off, he tried to pretend he was sinking into a heat like this and not bucking up into his fist. He never could make it work for him. Never could wash off the realisation that he’s still jerking off to something like the thought of his ex months after breaking up. 

He doesn’t know why he even tried, because this? Slipping slick and slow, the pad of his finger catching on and pushing past those folds, his walls quivering around this finger, nothing comes close to what Taeyong feels like.

Taeyong squirms a little, breathes heavily. He slides in knuckle deep, journeys back the way he came till only the tip is inside him before he dips back in. Taeyong’s length twitches. Unwittingly, his hand finds Jaehyun’s wrist and he takes it in his grasp. He’s always like that. He always wants to hold on to the hand Jaehyun is fucking him with. Sometimes he tightens that grip to press his hand in deeper, till the tips of his fingers are pushing up against his prostate and all his knuckles end up smeared with the lube slathered messily over his entrance. Sometimes he tightens his grip and his hips twist away because Jaehyun never means to hurt him but sometimes he gets impatient to pleasure him and gives him more than he can take. Mostly, he likes feeling in control more than actually taking control. 

He’s always like that, but this time, Jaehyun bristles, because that gold cross glints at him from the hand wrapped around his wrist and he doesn’t want to still be thinking about this. He doesn’t want to be hurt by this right now. Someone once told him they’re glad he isn’t quick to anger, because his anger courses like a burning house, thunderous and destructive, then quietly devastating, embers seething through the night, crumbling in on themselves by morning. There’s always loss, and it’s always bone dry.

He slips his finger out, and Taeyong’s confused, propping himself up on his elbows, lips parting to ask what’s wrong.

“Turn over,” he says. 

He does, wordlessly, but he gives him a strange look first. Maybe he hears the cracks of burning wood and he decides not to brave the fire. He’s spread out on his front, propped up on his elbows and looking over his shoulder. The curve of his back is serpentine, and Jaehyun is only a man. 

He takes him by the hips and pulls him back, coated fingers losing their slip, lube left in slippery handprints over his skin. He arranges him how he wants, hips raised off the bed, face down in his pillows, and he coats his fingers again. Free hand kneading his thigh, parting his cheeks. Taeyong squirms again, his entrance fluttering. He’s waiting for Jaehyun. 

He traces a glistening circle over his rim, lips pressing teasingly to the inside of his thigh. The muscle tightens momentarily under his ministrations, and taeyong stifles a moan. He slips his finger in. The slide is easy. He’s eager for it. 

“Another?” He asks.

“Yeah,” Taeyong breathes.

He gives him another. He watches his fingers sliding in and out of that small space, being swallowed up eagerly by his body. He spreads his fingers, gentle, once or twice, pumps in and out of him. 

Taeyong’s trembling. He thinks it’s pleasure. But he’s only half right. He’s breathing hard and swallowing down all his sounds, but he’s writhing, face and chest pressed to the sheets. His hand claws down to join Jaehyun’s. He’s not sure what he’s going to do but his finger looks slick already. Jaehyun’s lips part like he’s going to gasp, and he does when Taeyong slips a finger inside him alongside Jaehyun’s.

Impatient. He’s showing him he’s ready for something bigger. 

He groans, pulls out of him, with that wet squelch dampened by the music. Taeyong’s hand falls away naturally. 

“Condom?” He asks. 

“Don’t have any,” Taeyong mumbles. “I’m okay without. You?”

“I’m fine without,” he tells hims.

He’s already got the lube open, already dripping fat globs of it onto the tip of his length. He gives himself a few strong strokes. 

He pulls Taeyong closer by the hips again. His back slopes gracefully down from where he can see. Taeyong wanted a tattoo between his shoulder blades once. Ouroboros. He had picked out the design and everything, minimalist and small. Jaehyun was supposed to go with him. But they broke up and Taeyong went with Doyoung. And he came back with words in his skin. 

Understand, an anchor, the North Star, Ruby. He wasn’t there for any of them.

He traces his fingers over the ink on the back of his left arm distractedly. It’s strange that Taeyong has changed permanently since the last time they were like this. Some parts of him have turned concrete, less like a flowing river.

“Do you like it?” Taeyong asks. 

He’s straining up to look at him. Torso twisting, soft blond hair like honey down his nape. 

“Yeah,” he says. He must look lost, because Taeyong holds his hand and squeezes. 

“Do you want to stop?” He says.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“I don’t either.”

His hand rests heavily on his lower back, then, trails down his tailbone, grips his hip tight. He guides his length down his cleft. The tip catches on his entrance. 

“Can I push?” He asks, and he’s already pushing when Taeyong nods. 

He yields to him so beautifully. Body trembling but taking him. 

“Fuck,” Taeyong mumbles. Eyes screwed shut, brows drawn. 

Jaehyun’s fully sheathed in him now, entirely immersed in his body heat, in the tight squeeze of his rim at the base of his length. He takes him by the waist, both hands gripping the soft skin there. 

“You good?” He asks. 

Taeyong nods again. He gives him one small experimental thrust. Taeyong groans, and he’s not sure if it’s pleasure or pain. His body used to take him so easily. He wonders if they were too impatient, and then he wonders if maybe Taeyong’s lost the habit.

“You haven’t -

“Hmm?” Taeyong says.

“Nothing,” he says. It shouldn’t matter. 

“I haven’t,” Taeyong mumbles. “Not since Japan.”

He’s swallows thickly. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Nobody has had him quite the way he did. Byun Baekhyun with his angel voice and heart of gold and his easy smile and deep pockets with gold rings for Taeyong, he hasn’t had him quite the way Jeong Jaehyun did.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. 

He stays there, caressing his sides, giving him a moment to relax, to adjust. 

“I haven’t either,” he adds.

He knows what he’s implying and he knows the effect it’ll have on Taeyong. That in this past year and a half, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything with anyone, not even a kiss, not even with Johnny, not even when he was so comforting and so close. That he’s been stuck on the hurt Taeyong left him with, and then he was stuck on the hope they’d get back together. He knows it’ll make him feel guilty, and that’s something he may have wanted a year ago, but that’s not what he wants anymore. 

Taeyong ducks his head, and instinctively, Jaehyun holds him by the back of his neck. As if to say don’t think, don’t go back to what was, not when we’re here like this right now. 

  
January 2020

  
Jaehyun pulls off his beanie, Taeyong’s pink one, the one he borrowed over a month ago and is yet to return. He’s already toed his shoes off, and he curls his toes into the thick hotel room carpeting. He’s taken two steps forward from the door, but he hasn’t been able to move past the periphery of the room, just standing there watching Taeyong with an itch in his palms and a fluttering in his belly.

Taeyong’s standing at the writing desk with his back to him, shrugging off his coat and draping it over the back of a chair. Somewhere in the middle of the action he feels Jaehyun’s eyes on him, and he looks over his shoulder to meet his gaze. 

“What?” He says. 

Jaehyun shakes his head as if to say nothing. But he’s still standing there and he’s still watching him, so Taeyong turns around. He should say something, he should say that place was great, ramen is great, we should go back with the others some time, and he should take his coat off and change into his pjs and brush his teeth and go to bed. But he doesn’t. And now they’re looking at each other from across the room and the moment has gone on for too long to be brushed aside. 

They should have known they aren’t quite over what happened between them. They aren’t as evolved or as cerebral as they think they are, not grown up enough to walk through the streets of Fukuoka while snow sat fluffy and fresh over black asphalt and rooftops and trees and fell steady and silent while they sat at a cramped corner table at a ramen restaurant with no choice but to tangle their legs. He hasn’t quite wrapped up what his soft blond hair, his lashes, his smile and his long, delicate fingers make him feel. 

He goes to him, hesitantly, no conviction in his steps, but he finds himself close to him, and he finds himself taking him in his arms, and then there’s a moment’s hesitation. A moment of them deciding if they should close their eyes and close the distance between them, of lashes dipping, of the tips of their noses brushing. It lasts only a moment. When their lips meet, Jaehyun pulls him closer by the waist, and Taeyong hooks his thumb under the collar of Jaehyun’s coat and tugs it off his shoulder, and all hesitation is forgotten.

Half undressed, Taeyong’s front pressed against the desk, he preps him in a clumsy rush, and then he takes him from behind. Holds him, his back pressed to Jaehyun’s chest, wrists caught in his and immobilised. They move together like clockwork, like interlocking gears turning, catching on each other and releasing, over and over, and by the time they’re finished, Jaehyun’s legs are trembling, and Taeyong’s whole body is trembling, and they’ve managed to knock a lot of stuff off the table. 

The comedown is quiet, unsure of their footing, loose limbed caresses of waist and cheek and broken little kisses in an effort to keep the warmth of intimacy going for a bit longer. It doesn’t last long. Taeyong gives him a lingering kiss, and then he says he should shower and then Jaehyun’s by himself.

By the time he returns, Jaehyun’s prepared. They’re going to talk about this, he knows. They’ve always been stupid but they’ve never been irresponsible. They’re going to make this okay for the both of them and he knows it. He knows what he’s going to say, and none of it will be what he wants to say. 

I don’t want anything to change between us, Taeyong tells him, sitting on the edge of his bed. Jaehyun wants to ask why, why can’t it go back to how it was, why can’t you just say you still love me and you want me in your life and your bed and your future. But he remembers how it ended, and he remembers how it hurt him, and he remembers what Taeyong said when he left him. So he nods, and he says yeah, I understand. I don’t know if I’m ready for things to change again, either, he adds, partly because it’s true. Partly because he’s bitter and he wants Taeyong to know. He’s too proud to say anything else. 

Taeyong says thank you, of all the fucking things to have said after the evening they had, he says thank you. And he goes to bed. 

That night, Jaehyun sleeps in his own bed, back turned to Taeyong, and he thinks about that day in November that Jaehyun smiled at Taeyong for the first time in a long time and told him it’s pretty, pink is pretty on you. And Taeyong said bet it’ll be prettier on you, and he pulled his beanie off, hair sticking out all funny, and then he put it on Jaehyun. Pulled it down over his ears and rearranged his bangs and grinned and said there, I was right. 

Stupidly, Jaehyun held on to his beanie, like it meant something, like it was an act of surrendering. For both of them. He didn’t take it off. He wore it to the airport and he wore it on New Year’s day and he took Taeyong’s eyes on him to mean they were healing. And maybe they are, because he isn’t as hurt as he thought he’d be, and sleep is coming to him far easier than he thought it would. Maybe they are healing, just not how he’d hoped they would. 

When he wakes up, it’s light out, and Taeyong’s sitting on the edge of his bed and carding his fingers through Jaehyun’s hair. He’s dressed to leave.

“Wake up,” he says. “Get dressed, we’ll have to go soon.”

“Mm,” he says, and he rolls over onto his back. Taeyong’s hand trails from his hair to his chest and stays there. 

“I’m sorry,” Taeyong says. “About last night-

“Don’t be sorry,” Jaehyun says. He raises his hand to Taeyong’s cheek, and thumbs at the corner of his mouth. It’s a reminder, not to hurt himself like this. Jaehyun is unsmiling, but he isn’t resentful, and when he packs his bags, he remembers to put that pink beanie in the front zipper of Taeyong’s backpack. 

  
September 2020

  
“Should I -

“Yeah,” Taeyong says. “I’m okay.”

Jaehyun leans over him to press a comforting kiss to his shoulder before he rolls his hips deeper, gentler than he’s used to being with Taeyong. He sets a slow pace for them. When they pulled each other close and Taeyong got down on his knees so eagerly just now, Jaehyun didn’t think this is what it would end up being. He didn’t think they’d get so raw over the fact that they’re nobody else’s.

“Still okay?” He asks.

“Good,” Taeyong says, tucking his face into his pillow and humming out his approval. 

He slides in deep, hands tightening over his waist, pulling him back to meet his thrusts. The sounds of their ragged breathing and the small sounds Taeyong’s swallowing get buried underneath the music. But the sounds of their bodies meeting don’t. He’s sure if someone has their ear to the door they’ll hear it. It doesn’t matter to him. 

He wants to kiss him. When he gets like this, when he’s so far gone, he always needs to kiss him. That’s that old soul in him, the part of him that needs to believe there’s more to this than just chasing release. He needs kisses, and he needs to be told he’s loved, and he needs to look into Taeyong’s lovely eyes and find himself in them. He supposes that’s too much to ask for the situation they’re in, but he guesses Taeyong can spare him a few kisses.

He lowers himself, covers his back with his chest, still fucking into him. It won’t work. Taeyong’s body has been trembling, arms and legs weak, barely holding him up. The weight of Jaehyun’s body, the burden of closeness, that’s not something he’s ready to take. He crumples onto the bed, groaning and craning his neck to find Jaehyun’s lips, and he does, just barely, Jaehyun steals his kiss, arms winding around his shoulders to hold him like an anchor when he keeps thrusting into him. 

He’s writhing in his hold. His cock must be pressed between his body and the mattress, both their weights coming down with every thrust, it must be leaking, and he must be aching to touch it. 

“Jaehyun,” Taeyong says, quiet and needy. “Jaehyun let me -

“Not yet,” he says. “Just a bit longer, can you hold on?”

He nods, but he’s shifting, turning to take the pressure off his throbbing length, and now they’re lying on their sides. Legs tangled, he pressed breathless kisses to Taeyong’s shoulder and keeps fucking him. He’s clutching him so tight to his chest, he wonders if he can breathe.

His soft hair tickles his face, it smells like treatment. He tucks his chin over his shoulder, turns against the side of his neck, smooth skin, smelling like body wash and woody cologne. He kisses him desperately, and Taeyong moans, that half choked inhale he makes when he’s close. He’s stroking himself. 

Jaehyun’s desperate grip travels over his chest and to his throat, that thick column under his palm, the little peak of his Adam’s apple. Then to his jaw, cheeks smushed in his tight grip, he turns his face towards himself. Kisses him so clumsily, so messily, so sweetly, but he keeps slipping away from him. Jostled by the way he thrusting into him, but he’s certain he’ll smack him upside the head if he were to stop now and ask for kisses. 

He decides to take the risk. His length slipping out of Taeyong is accompanied by a wet little sound, and a disgruntled whimper from Taeyong. He tugs at his limbs, hasty and unmeasured, rolls him onto his back and clambers over him. He’s rushing because he’s certain Taeyong’s nearing his release and he doesn’t want that to gentle swell to break over his sentiments. His old soul and his need to see himself in Taeyong’s eyes. 

“Hyung,” he says. All the while grabbing him by the hips and pulling him up his thighs. “Taeyongie hyung.”

He jams a pillow under his back. He doesn’t want to damage it any more than it already is. 

“Yeah?” Taeyong says. He’s draped over his thighs, loose limbed and legs open, slacked jawed and bucking up into his fist. Half lidded eyes and spit slicked lips. 

“You’re so pretty,” he says. Cock in hand and cockhead breeching his entrance. Taeyong’s hips jerk at the feeling, but Jaehyun wraps his arms around his thighs and stills him, till he’s buried inside him again. 

“Jaehyunie,” he says, purposeless, like he always does. Like he’s making sure he’s there with him, that he’ll take him where he wants to go. 

He will. Gripping his thighs so hard, fucking him slow and deep, every meeting of their bodies pushing him further up the mattress till he’s nearly at the headboard. Pleasure ripples down his spine and all his insides twist up and tighten, pleasure licks up his thighs. His balls are heavy and tight and he’s barely holding on. Toes curled and jaw clenched and every breath ragged. 

“Jaehyun.”

“Let go,” Jaehyun says, falling to his palms, caging his body between his arms. Taeyong is looking up at him, lips trembling, tongue probing at a corner of his mouth. He kisses him, but it ends up being breathy moans and open mouths and spit.

“Let go, hyung. I’m close,” he says. “Should I pull out?”

Taeyong shakes his head frantically, tightens a fist in Jaehyun’s hair and holds him close. He shudders once, loses his rhythm. Toes pressing into the mattress. He shudders again and his whole body tightens. The scent of his skin, his own smell, the taste of his mouth, and the heat where they’re joined, he’s breathing him in by chestfuls. He’s awash with him, hips stuttering, he tries to kiss him but ends up mouthing at his chin, and he’s coming. He’s there.

Stuttering hips, stamping his release inside him. He’s going jelly limbed, he’s going light headed.

He vaguely registers Taeyong kissing him, still clumsy, still jerking himself off. He needs a little bit of a push, and Jaehyun knows how to give it to him. Two fingers down, grazing over his flushed cock, pressed eagerly to his perineum. 

Taeyong whines, bucking down onto his fingers. He doesn’t know why it does it for him. It doesn’t work for Jaehyun. But just a little pressure and Taeyong’s keening softly, body locking up. His release splatters warm and sticky all over his belly and a little on his chest. 

“Jaehyun,” he says again, quiet and sleepy. 

“I’m here,” Jaehyun says. He kisses him gently. Slides his palm over his cheek and kisses him again. Taeyong shivers. The heat between them is dissipating and he’s getting cold again. He clutches at Jaehyun’s back with both hands. He’s curious for a moment because they’re both dry, and he wonders what he did with the cum dripping down his fingers. His right hand is still faintly sticky, till it isn’t anymore. 

“Tyong,” he mumbles. 

“Mm,” he says.

He shakes his head. He had nothing to say except his name. 

Slowly, the world comes back. The dim light coming from Taeyong’s live screensaver, the balled up mess of sweaters at the foot of the bed. The crumpled up sheets. Wet patches where the cum dripped off his belly, where he wiped his hand. 

He’s softening inside him. He should pull out, he should clean him up. He’ll want to change his sheets, too, and he should help him with that. But not yet. His legs are jelly and Taeyong’s kisses are lazy, broken. Left hand playing with the baby hair at Jaehyun’s nape.

He pulls away from his lips for a moment. Looks at his cheeks, the colour of cherry blossoms over the Meguro river, his lips, lip balm smudged over the boundaries the way he colours all his drawings. He can’t quite look him in the eye, still, not for too long. Only as long as he needs to see himself in them. 

The music is still on, soft guitar and a soft voice that strains on high notes. Gondry.

He holds Taeyong’s face in his hands, kisses him gently, Taeyong’s hands curling around his arms. 

  
July 2020

  
“Go on then, gimme,” Taeyong says, palm outstretched. 

They’re in Taeyong’s room now, at Jaehyun’s request, after Taeyong’s ice cream cake was polished off and the noise receded and everyone cleaned up the mess and went back to their rooms. He told Taeyong he has a birthday present to give him and he can’t give it to him out in the living room. 

“It’s not, uh,” Jaehyun says, and he grins, nervous. 

“It’s a song,” he says.

“Oh?” Taeyong says. He takes his hand back. “Yours?”

Jaehyun shakes his head. He fishes out his AirPods and he puts one in his ear and one in Taeyong’s palm. He’s careful not let him feel the tremble in his hands and the sweat on his palms, and then he sits down gingerly on the edge of Taeyong’s bed. Taeyong follows him, settling the earbud in, and sitting just as gingerly by his side. 

“I’m excited,” Taeyong says. He means it. His words have a special way of tumbling from his mouth like dominoes when he’s wired.

The moment Jaehyun presses play, nothing really happens. Taeyong sits there wordlessly, restlessly picking at a hangnail, until the end of the first line, and then his hand slows to a sporadic twitch by the end of the first verse. And then it stills entirely until the song ends. 

Jaehyun is nervous, and he straightens his back like he always does when he’s nervous. He doesn’t look at Taeyong. He just sits staring straight ahead at Taeyong’s technicolor thoughts on his bedroom walls. He doesn’t have to look to know he’s still subdued in the strangest way.

He lets him be for a bit. He’s learned to be self assured and patient with Taeyong. He’s learned that he takes his time trying to say what he wants when he needs badly to be understood, because he tends to get messy, and he tends to meander, like water, formless, and he can’t risk losing what he wanted to say.

“I didn’t realise how much I wanted to hear that in your voice,” he says finally. “Thank you. This is the best - I mean that - the best present.”

He steels himself and looks at him. His blue hair, like peacock feathers, but flat and artificial and chemical. The smell of pain patches still clings to him, and he thinks he thinks he’s two years too late in saying what he said tonight. 

_This side of you that you’ve held on to so tightly, hidden, suffocated inside your chest, show it to me. Everything you long for, all of your loneliness, pour it out into my hands_. 

The thing is, in the past couple of months, Jaehyun has faced a nation’s wrath. At twenty three, he’s borne the burden of the world’s condemnation. And all the classes they had to take on relatable communication and political correctness, with flowcharts and interactive sessions on publicly owning mistakes, all of SM’s handbooks on appropriate behaviour by country, could not prepare him for what he experienced in the past two months. 

His blessing of a family steadied him, his angel of a father gave him a backbone and said be strong and say you’re sorry so he did, and he did the best that he could. In the middle of the night, with the whole group crowding in his small bedroom and Johnny’s warm hand on his shoulder. Vomit clawed its way up his throat, and his hands trembled till Johnny made him go to sleep, terrified of what he’d wake up to. Jungwoo was supposed to be the one keeping an eye on him that night, because his bed was five feet from Jaehyun’s, but Taeyong stayed. He sat by him and he let him hold his hand till he finally drifted off.

Morning brought with it a storm, but he was largely unshaken by it, because at dawn he found a banana milk in the fridge with a post it note that read For Jaehyunie. He stood there in the triangle of light from the open fridge, looking at the squat little bottle, absolutely taken by the thought that he could be okay if nothing else went right for him that day. That this little token of Taeyong’s steady presence in his life could be more good than most people have had in theirs. 

And the thing is, the day he heard Taeyong’s song, Blue, it all fell into place. Everything that happened between them. 

Taeyong’s rage comes from hurt, and it swells like a river in spate. It takes hours, days, of steady rain, a hundred swollen streams gushing down hillsides, inundating him, it takes a hundred different things going wrong for him to spill over his embankments. When the flood comes, it’s catastrophic. People picking up the pieces in his wake for days to come.

All he needed was for Jaehyun to say pour it all into my hands, and he never did, and he was left picking up their pieces. All it took for him to realise this was months of hurt and anger, months of push and pull reconciliation, months of remembering the beauty of what they were to each other, and finally, Taeyong writing himself the song he’s always wanted to hear. 

Jaehyun had nothing left to do but sing it for him. 

“I should have said it a long time ago, but I’ve said it now,” he says. “So tell me. Everything you wanted to say and you never did.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Taeyong says.

“It matters to me,” he says. “When things go wrong for me, you’re always there. Even these past couple of months, hyung, you were there. Despite everything, you’re still here with me. Was I? Was I there with you?”

“You were,” Taeyong says, as if he’s upset that he could ever think otherwise. “I was just. So many things went wrong, and I didn’t - there was so much hate. There were so many people convinced I didn’t deserve to be here with all of you and it’s so hard to hold your own beliefs against a current that strong, you know? You know now, you’ve seen it for yourself, how it gets to you.”

Jaehyun nods. 

“And you know what, I - I didn’t feel like me anymore. There was nothing about me that I recognised, Jaehyun, do you know how that feels? My clothes, and the the way I talked, and what I talked about - I just, I didn’t like it? Because I didn’t choose it. It wasn’t. It didn’t feel real. It felt like it didn’t matter how hard I pushed myself, I’d have nothing that anyone could really like because it was all just disingenuous bullshit.”

His voice sounds like he’s got a lump stuck in his throat, and he doing that thing where he tucks his bottom lip between his teeth.

He wants to interject, and he wants to grab him by the shoulders and say how do I make you see what everyone else sees, but he reminds himself, that he’s listening. That he’s letting him speak. That this is an old wound that he’s patched up all on his own and he doesn’t need him to show him his worth.

“People eat, and people sleep, and they talk about things they like, and they go outside and take pictures of the sky, right? They talk about their feelings with the people they love, right? But me, back then, I - they wouldn’t let me eat, and I couldn’t fucking sleep. And we were so busy, it had been so long since I heard a song I liked or wrote something meaningful or anything. I felt like I wasn’t even a, a person.”

“Like you weren’t even breathing,” Jaehyun says quietly. “And you didn’t - and you didn’t tell me.”

“I tried. I don’t think I understood what was going wrong. But I knew something was going very wrong, I knew I felt awful and when I tried talking to you about it I felt like - like I was being a big fucking burden to you - and that’s not your fault.”

“You weren’t a burden to me - 

“I know. I know that. It’s not your fault, Jaehyun,” he says. His lashes are wet now, and he’s still so tightly wound, his words fall like dominoes. “I kept thinking there’s no way you could love me. There’s just no way you want this in your life. But I - it wasn’t you. I didn’t like me. I didn’t want me. Does that make sense?”

“I wish you’d told me,” he says. “I wish you could’ve just - you said all those things about wanting to take up space but I had no idea what you meant. I wish I’d asked earlier. I wish I could have fixed it for you - 

“Jaehyunie. You were twenty two,” he says. “Did you think you’d do everything right at twenty two? I was twenty four and I fucked up so bad. And it’s not your responsibility to fix me.”

Jaehyun takes a big, shuddering breath, and he’s still trembling, palms still sweaty when he runs them over his face.

“You - you’re so stupid, hyung. You were the most important thing in my life, you know that? You still fucking are, so important to me. Listen to me, now, you took up so much of my head. You had the right to my time. My attention. Everything I had, you had a claim to, do you understand?” He says. Taeyong’s looking at him, sucking on his lower lip, lashes wet. 

“And I loved the person you were at twenty and I loved the person you were at twenty four. You were important,” he adds. His voice breaks over that. His anger has always bone dry but there’s no anger anymore. There’s regret, for wasted time, for the hurt he caused, for the hurt he felt, and he hasn’t ever felt regret quite like this before, but it’s wet and it’s cold and it’s awfully still. 

“i’m telling your mom you said I’m more important than her - 

Jaehyun smiles. And Taeyong smiles. A push in the wrong direction and both of them will cry, but they’re okay for now. 

“You should have asked me again,” Jaehyun says. 

“Asked you what?”

“You asked me if you changed, would I still love you, and I said I didn’t know and -

“I was supposed to ask you again.”

“I’d still love you,” Jaehyun says. “Because. You might not write songs anymore, and you might not draw or dance or whatever, but you’d still care, you know? About your mom and your sister, your nephew, your dog. Me. You’d still want to leave a place better for you having been there and I don’t think that’ll ever change. That’s what I loved. That’s why I loved you. You care. None of the other stuff mattered.”

“Jaehyunie, just - fuck you, really,” Taeyong says. Wetly, toothlessly. 

He clambers into Jaehyun’s lap, and he’s taken aback, but he holds him without needing to think. 

“Sorry I made you cry on your birthday.”

“I’m glad you did,” Taeyong says.

  
December 2016

  
“Do they end up together?” Taeyong says, leaning up to kiss him. “The people in this movie?"

“Maybe.”

He gets really quiet for a bit. Absent minded patterns on his skin. Jaehyun kisses the bridge of his nose, kisses his cheekbone and the corner of his mouth. 

“What if we hurt each other?” Taeyong says, a lot quieter.

“Hyung,” Jaehyun says.

“I’m serious. What if that happens?”

“Say meet me in Montauk,” Jaehyun says into a sticky kiss. “I’ll find you there. And we can try again.”

“I don’t even know where that is,” Taeyong mumbles.

“You know what, neither do I,” he says, and he’s happy with how Taeyong laughs, sleepy and soft. He nuzzles against his skin, and stays there for a bit. 

“Meet me in Miryang,” Taeyong says, finally, against his shoulder. Jaehyun guffaws without meaning to. Taeyong has a way of saying stupid shit that leaves him wheezing out of nowhere. 

“Meet me in Mokpo,” Jaehyun says, and now they’re both laughing hysterically. 

Teary eyed and sore jawed from laughing, all tangled up and warm on a December evening, invincible in a way he’s certain he’ll never feel again, he holds Taeyong’s face in his hands, kisses him gently.

“I love you,” he says.

They let mirth ease into joy, and Taeyong’s laughter becomes a tiny smile.

“Don’t forget,” Taeyong says.

September 2020

  
He’s caught his breath now, but he’s still breathless, waiting for Taeyong to say something.


	2. Hecking heck

So a friend of mine just told me Jaehyun’s Christmas movie recommendation is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not like I just wrote a whole fic based on a line from that movie because Clementine reminds me so much of Taeyong or anything like that. I’m good, I’m not crying or anything, just needed to scream a teeny tiny bit. 

Aaaaaaaaa sajkabahjsk

Okay, I’m done. Sorry about the false alarm TT

Hope you have a great day. And do watch the movie if you haven’t already! 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for making it to the end! I was a little nervous about posting this TT   
> Let me know what you think :)


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